Comscore reports that Google is the number two site worldwide in 2006, but grew 9 percent, unlike Microsoft and Yahoo, that only grew 5 percent in 2006 and occupy the first and the third position.

"Google's popularity has been driven in part by its international appeal as well as the rapid uptake of some of Google's applications beyond traditional Web search," said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe. "Examples include the 40-percent year-over-year growth in visitors to Google Image Search, the 71-percent growth in visitors to Gmail, and the 62-percent growth in visitors to Google Maps."

A recent post from Hitwise showed that Google Calendar surpassed MSN Calendar and was about to surpass Yahoo Calendar. "In the six months from June 2006 to December 2006, the market share of visits to Google Calendar increased by 333%, at the expense of its main competitors."

After being featured on Google's homepage and in Google News, Google Blog Search gained a lot of traction. Another reason might be that Technorati continue to be really slow and almost unusable at times.

In June last year, when Google Earth celebrated one year, Google announced "more than 100 million unique Google Earth downloads".

Last year, Blogger grew 90 percent to 93 million visitors, Gmail was up 71 percent to 60 million visitors, while YouTube grew 1,972 percent (yes, you read that well) to 120 million visitors.

5 comments:

It is only till Google focus more on innovations within products and make them more unique will it get more and more market share. If Google can't differentiate it products with existing ones, there is obviously no incentives for users to make a switch.

Wow, I never knew that Google had both a Google Blog Search and a (Google) Blogger Blog Search. I thought that Blogger Search would focus on Blogger blogs, but the page for it seems to indicate that it searches all blogs. What's up with that?

The old Blogger blogs had two options in the Navbar: * Search this blog* Search all blogsNow only the first is available. So a pointer to Blogger's Blog Search can be found only in Blogger's homepage.

I agree it's pretty silly and redundant to have two interfaces for the same search engine. Unfortunately, it's hard to restrict the search to Blogger blogs, because not all of them are hosted on Blog*Spot.

I think it's interesting that during the summer of last year, everyone convinced themselves that many Google services were not getting traction. Now we're seeing a few people question that conventional wisdom, which is nice.